Today I start reviewing science fiction short stories from the year 1983 as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1984 Annual World's Best SF, featuring the editor's picks from that genre for the previous year. In '83 I was living a frugal, single life in Gainesville as a cook in a local Chinese restaurant, studying foreign languages on the side like Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese...almost a monastic kind of existence, looking back on it. This was also the year in which the Nuclear Freeze movement took off in Europe, while a very important TV movie on nuclear war was shown here in the States: The Day After. More on this special year next week...right now let's a take a look at those stories...
BLOOD MUSIC by Greg Bear
Predating the late Michael Crichton's interesting novel Prey on a similar theme by nineteen years, this story examines a scenario in which nanotechnology merges with microbiological synthesis to produce an unseen world within one's body that works much faster than does evolutionary change in modifying and "improving" it. An employee at a company researching such stuff foolishly injects himself with some of the microscopic, synthesized protein material and the change begins to happen...what an ending!
POTENTIAL by Isaac Asimov
It seems that supercomputers have the capacity for breaking down the myriad sections within the human genome to find that which predicts telepathic abilities. The government's top-secret espionage section is naturally interested in this and discovers that an Iowan teenage boy may well be endowed with such talent. They visit, interview and test him...tough luck, guess they were wrong. When they leave, he breathes a sigh of relief...then realizes that they had been mistakenly trying to see if he could read other people's minds...
KNIGHT OF SHALLOWS by Rand B. Lee
This tale is a look at the world worlds of alternate universes, and it seems that there are certain individuals who have the ability (or curse) to travel in and out of them, each universe containing a different version of that person. The story's protagonist is one of these and his subsequent adventures have him searching through wildly divergent realities for a murderer (an alternate self), who kills other alternate selves...while our hero collaborates with yet another alternate self. All within a few blocks in Key West, Florida, centered around a bar. Intriguing...and a little funny, too...
SPENDING A DAY AT THE LOTTERY FAIR by Frederik Pohl
This brief story, similar in theme to Shirley Jackson's famous 1948 short story The Lottery, takes place in a future of overpopulation as each nation on Earth takes its own path in dealing with it. In America they hold fancy festivals involving lotteries...but a small percentage of the entrants will die while few believe their "number" will come up because of the low odds. Yet in this story all abortion and birth control have been banned...while killing off little children in the lottery is okay. Ultimately, this is a tale indicting the ongoing politics about abortion, with the author siding with those complaining how many of the "pro-lifers" lose interest in the lives they want to protect after birth occurs...
Next week I continue looking at the year 1983 as it pertained to short science fiction...
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